Breaking News!

You won't find this story anywhere else, but Pope John Paul II has died. This hard-to-find story has been forced down by that anti-religious MSM, so you won't have a chance of seeing it on your televisions. It's as if they think everything in the world happening right now is more important than the Pope's death.

Yeah, I mean all of that. Except the exact opposite.

Look, I understand that the passing of the Pope is a big deal. Nobody is arguing that, I don't think. His reign was longer than almost any other in the long history of the Catholic church. The Catholic church has ever been one of the most powerful organizations on the planet. His papacy thrust the office from a provincial religious leader to an outspoken globetrotting moral activist. There is a lot about Karol Wojtyla's life to be celebrating, lauding, and remembering.

Yet I can't help but think that other things have happened in the world in the last two days. We have three twenty-four hour news channels that have offered wall-to-wall Pope coverage since Saturday (maybe with breaks for commercials and weather), and will most likely continue to do so until a few days after the smoke burns white from the conclave.

The media is laying down on the job here, folks. I don't know whether it's that the American public can't pay attention to more than one thing at once or whether the administrators of the media think that we can't pay attention to more thing at once, but the two amount to basically the same thing. We live in a complex world, but for the last couple of weeks, we've been dominated by single issues. What about the horrendous school shooting in Red Lake, Minnesota? What about the continuing tour on "reforming" Social Security? What about the train crash in Washington state? What about the coordinated attack by insurgents at Abu Ghraib prison that left 44 US servicemen injured?

The Pope's death deserves time on the news networks. But not all of the time they have available.

Fargus...